Rage and I updated PTR 2.7.4 v2 Non-Season clears using the Adjusted Clear method. While there isn’t a ton of data to go by, a glance will give a general sense of how they are performing. Please push these updated sets.
Data from S27 will be rolled out in the near future, indicating the Angelic effects behind these clears. We need more data! Please go into the PTR and push your hearts out. (Not literally!)
I feel this statement is quite relevant for Necro players. Tho possibly “pull” may be more appropriate…
Or “break a leg”, or “throw us a bone”?
The ultimate… “Get a Life!!!”
Looks like my old Tal’s clear, I did a new one last night. My Tal’s Archon Meteor is up to 133 in 9:40. I think that should be the top adjusted Tal’s clear now. No one is doing Tal’s though, needs more testing!
It also sucks that it’s going to be Archon on top for Tal’s I think. It’s just way stronger than non-Archon Meteor variants. And it feels a decent bit stronger than Tal’s FO to me as well, but that would need testing by better orb players. Ronin has at least a few tiers on me with orbs even adjusting for paragon etc. Need a few high skill higher paragon guys to try Archon meteors too. Pretty sure Archon Meteors will beat orbs given equivalent gear/paragon/skill.
It’s always Archon in the end…
I’ve updated the data, as you said – you’re number #1 - sorry it was Archon-ed.
Tal’s could be de-Archoned by just preventing things like Familiar and Storm Armor from proccing 2-piece meteors, right? Then you basically wouldn’t be able to generate Meteors in Archon form since you can only deal one damage type.
Yep, exactly.
Although… you would still be able do a reverse Archon setup and have meteors buffed by Swami while out of Archon.
This would also have some collateral damage IMO, it would kill a bit of the fun with the non-Archon builds. Spamming out meteors from Storm Armor/Familiar is pretty fun, it’s just a bit too weak right now.
Another option would be to include an non-bracer non-shoulder item to buff meteors. The Tal’s Archon Meteor build has no free armor slots to incorporate anything else, requires RoRG + Nilfur’s (worn) + Fazula’s/Swami (one worn, one cubed). If there was an additional armor slot meteor item, it would be impossible to fit with a full Archon Tal’s Meteor build. It just can’t be shoulders or bracers because you could drop Aughild’s to fit it.
Doubt we’ll see that at this stage in the PTR cycle, but that would be my preferred solution.
Yeah, new item… fingers crossed, but probably not.
Did you ever get a more conclusive answer on how the Smoldering Core ability works on a dense group of mobs? I read your earlier answer, where you were kind of going back and forth on that, but wasn’t sure if you’d reached any further insights. I’ve seen a variety of different impressions on this from other people, from “mainly works on single targets” to “works fine on big packs”.
Do you know if anybody’s tried just using Deathwish instead of SC? It’s a 4.25x multiplier rather than 6x, but if it works all the time vs any number of targets, that seems like better value…
Yeah I tried that briefly. I think wudijo tried it too. Main advantage is that you can combine it with Orb of Infinite Depth for a huge toughness gain. And another 1.4x damage from OOiD.
Damage-wise it didn’t feel any better to me. The toughness helps a lot at lower paragon.
I still think based on feel that you get good value from Smoldering Core in density, but I haven’t done any more testing. I wanted to try it with Meteor Shower too to see how it looks with that.
EDIT:
I can reliably stack to 10 on a tight cluster of enemies.
Base hit is 35.5k, here’s 7-8 enemies all getting hit for 213k-214k (=6x).
I had a theory that landing a meteor that doesn’t hit consecutively would reset the stacks but I just tested that briefly and I could maintain 10 stacks on a group of enemies while tossing a new meteor off to the side, so it’s not that either.
I think it’s just the short persistence of the buff timer. For TR2 meteor builds, where you don’t have full control over where the meteors land, sometimes you’ll have some meteors randomly landing on the edge of your pull and if that happens a couple times in a row you might run out the buff timer and reset it to zero.
Also if you are kiting around a pull you might risk resetting the stacks if you don’t consistently land meteors in the middle.
The non-fire meteors actually have fairly small AoE so in a big pull if you aren’t landing meteors consistently you might just be periodically elapsing the buff timer.
Good analysis. Seems like SC is basically as it should be- which ought to prevent Deathwish from becoming a problem.
I’ve been doing a bit of thinking… For the seasonal crucible powers, I think we’re likely to be able to use certain clears to determine an overall “buff value” for each crucible. And, I think that’s all we really need to do, since most sets haven’t changed from what they are currently in E16 / S26. So the estimate for S27 will just be the current power of the set (peak clear, avg of top 10, whatever) plus the crucible buff value.
I think the PTR data pool, as a whole, is going to be too frothy and volatile to really tell us anything, but that probably won’t be the case if we just look at some top clears.
For example, using LoD HotA, Kozmik recently did GR 150 in 14:30 with 2839 paragon, which adjusts to 152.6. That’s 4.1 tiers higher than the best adjusted NS clear, also by Kozmik, which is 148 / 14:02 / 4940, adjusted to 148.5. So, it looks like that is a very good estimation of that crucible’s value. I think Wastes and IK will get a similar amount of value (both already incorporate WW in their normal gameplay), while MOTE and Raekor will get a little less of a bump, since they need to switch up their setups, and will get maybe ~3 tiers.
I think we can make similar estimates for many of the other crucibles, too.
I’ve updated the PTR Set Tracker with new clear data occurring after July 26th patch. A new set of tabs were created for Non-Season
v1 = Initial Patch
v2 = July 26th
Once the data accumulates, I’ll start to roll out the S27 tabs.